![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
I'm going to be pretty lazy since I feel like I'm taking internet from the hands of others (why, I don't really know. I have Fady's mom's laptop at the moment, and she hasn't woken up yet, so that's probably why I'm so nuts at the moment.)
So instead of writing a whole new post, I'm going to put up several sent messages that I wrote to individuals, and take out the personal references. Much of it will be new as I recall stuff.
We got off the plane (where we'd gotten free upgrades to one + coach, World Traveler Plus, which was like having some extra leg room and not much else, there were two more upgrade levels that we were denied) and figured out our visas. Because we were asleep when the person with the formwork came by, we had to fill it out at the line, and got to queue up like real Brits. But the line traveled fast, and we all went through as a group, where we were questioned mercilessly but quickly and made it through ok. We bought our three day tube passes, and rode the subway ... forever. The boys picked the hotel, and were very excited to get a two star deal on a tube station, but then forgot to figure out the hotel location vs. what we really wanted to do. It was about an hour twenty to the hotel from the airport, and forty minutes to the historical areas we wanted to explore. Plus, a ten minute walk from the tube station, Gant's Hill, to our hotel at Valentine's Park. I teased them mercilessly about it, once I got over how tired I was.
Anyhow, we checked in by telling them John's name, and that was that. No ID check or anything. It was the type of place that was obviously older, but tried very hard to be nice. We didn't realize the trying hard part when we were tired, sweaty, and had just walked into a tiny room with two hard, squeaky beds, peeling wallpaper, and a 2 foot by 2 foot shower. We had a good laugh about what two stars really meant, unpacked a bit, and then went on to meet the only person we knew in London, Laura.
After a bit of showering, napping, and unpacking, we went to meet a friend of John's sister, a British girl my age (this would be Laura). We had email instructions to meet her at a Pret A Manger at a tube station, but due to a minor miscommunication, we were waiting on opposite corners of a shop that was bent in an L-shape and so couldn't see each other. Once we figured it out, we laughed and had a beer at a local pub, along with some nice sandwiches for dinner. Mine was goat cheese, arugula (rocket in London!) and roasted red peppers on a nice firm white bread, along with a nice cup of a coffee-like dark, warm, flat ale (I wish I knew the name of it, so I could drink it again). Us travelers were really tired, though. So at about nine pm, we left the pub, walked through Kensington for a bit and found a really pretty, open park, with a group of teenagers fighting with water pistols across the green from a palace or something. Eventually, we went back to the hotel on the tube.
I just want to write you a quick note to say I made it into London ok. I don't have the adaptor to charge my phone, nor is there free wifi anywhere around here, so we found an internet cafe to drop a quick line. I should have regular access to email and free wifi in Jordan, however. That will be awesome, since I already have like 50 emails in the last two days, and internet access is £2 per hour - which is kind of expensive at the 2:1 exchange rate.
We wandered around yesterday after getting a beer (warm, flat, good dark ale though) at a real British pub. And today we've been walking around in Westminster, looking at historical sites and the Eye. I've taken a lot of architecture photos, and John and Fady are starting to tease me that I never take photos of people. Well, I did take a photo of a really pretty woman riding a bike. But I was also stuck in traffic on the London Ducks tour and was starting to get bored :)
The Ducks tour was pretty cool but it makes me want to do the Seattle Ducks, something that I never thought I would say. The London Ducks seem much more dignified, seeing as they don't make you sing or give out any duck quackers.
We went to find a pub for a late lunch/early dinner kind of deal, and they picked the most English looking place available. Which was hilarious, because it served Thai food. Really, really good Thai, actually, though the boys were shocked and wanted to move on. I claimed my feet were too tired and got a sweet curry out of the deal.
We went to the National Gallery on the evening of the same day. That was pretty cool, we got to see real Van Goghs, Raphaels, and so on. They were pretty protective about photos, though, so no good way to document that part. And of all the museum shops that I ended up visiting in London, that was by far the dullest. You could buy pencils with marabou on the ends, cheap watercolor sets meant for kids, and tons of blank-inside cards. Come on, art, you can do better!
The next day, Friday, we went back to the Westminster area to find more museums. This was all after Fady couldn't sleep and had been up since 2 am, quietly but steadily interrupting me and John's sleep until about 6 am, when we finally all called it and turned the lights on and laughed at each other. However, we couldn't travel on our tube passes till after 9:30 am, so we killed some time in the hotel, where we got the full English breakfast every morning. That was probably one star in the two star hotel rating. They custom made your fresh eggs, which had good dark orange yolks, and then gave you some previously frozen hash browns, fresh toast, and somewhat weak but effective British coffee. I love the black currant jam, and look forward to hunting it down again when I'm in the states. I heard that black currants only recently became legal in New York due to some weird olden-days law, and that explains why I hardly see them except as an import. I love black currants. Anyhow....
We ended up at the British Museum, where we saw some amazing marbles, fossils and geological specimens. Also, the Rosetta stone. We went through several school crowds and marveled at the huge size of many of the things the Brits borrowed from other cultures. Then we got tired of the whistling, screaming children and moved on to the next museum, the Natural History Museum, which we had the wrong directions to. It was funny, though, we asked a bobby, hopped back on the tube, and figured it all out ok. The Natural History Museum was pretty cool but it was SWELTERING. So we only stayed inside for about 45 minutes, but I raided their shop since theirs was the coolest of any of the museum shops I'd seen so far.
The boys were tired, and wanted to take a nap on the lawn in front of the museum, but I harangued them into moving. I wasn't going to be comfortable, sitting there watching them sleep.
We went back to the hotel on the tube, took a nap and showered, and went to Ministry of Sound. That was quite the experience, as we were getting there at about 8, had wrong directions again (seriously Google Maps London, WTF?!?) and needed to eat badly. We walked around to an intersection (more of a roundabout really) where there was a pub with a beer garden on one side and a Balti place on the other. (Balti being some iron pot or something that is integral to some sort of Indian subculture's cuisine.) The boys wanted to go to the pub, and I put my foot down. We'd already been to a pub for lunch the same day, and I told them that one pub per day is plenty, while two would be too many. Also, I heard the Indian food in London is the best you can get outside of India, and Friday was our last night there. So we went to have Indian food. The boys both got some version of biryiani while I had balti. And it was DEEEELICIOUS. I have no regrets.
We ended up at the club shortly after it opened. Ministry was very big. It probably could fit a thousand people in one of the four rooms plus a VIP area that was glassed in so you could be jealous of the punters who got to sit there. It seemed to be roughly broken into downtempo/lounge, house, hard trance, and glitch. FOUR ROOMS OF DIFFERENT STUFF ALL GOOD, K?!?
We left kind of early, though, seeing as the club was open until 6:30 am. I bought souvenirs, though!
Then Saturday was our travel day.
So instead of writing a whole new post, I'm going to put up several sent messages that I wrote to individuals, and take out the personal references. Much of it will be new as I recall stuff.
We got off the plane (where we'd gotten free upgrades to one + coach, World Traveler Plus, which was like having some extra leg room and not much else, there were two more upgrade levels that we were denied) and figured out our visas. Because we were asleep when the person with the formwork came by, we had to fill it out at the line, and got to queue up like real Brits. But the line traveled fast, and we all went through as a group, where we were questioned mercilessly but quickly and made it through ok. We bought our three day tube passes, and rode the subway ... forever. The boys picked the hotel, and were very excited to get a two star deal on a tube station, but then forgot to figure out the hotel location vs. what we really wanted to do. It was about an hour twenty to the hotel from the airport, and forty minutes to the historical areas we wanted to explore. Plus, a ten minute walk from the tube station, Gant's Hill, to our hotel at Valentine's Park. I teased them mercilessly about it, once I got over how tired I was.
Anyhow, we checked in by telling them John's name, and that was that. No ID check or anything. It was the type of place that was obviously older, but tried very hard to be nice. We didn't realize the trying hard part when we were tired, sweaty, and had just walked into a tiny room with two hard, squeaky beds, peeling wallpaper, and a 2 foot by 2 foot shower. We had a good laugh about what two stars really meant, unpacked a bit, and then went on to meet the only person we knew in London, Laura.
After a bit of showering, napping, and unpacking, we went to meet a friend of John's sister, a British girl my age (this would be Laura). We had email instructions to meet her at a Pret A Manger at a tube station, but due to a minor miscommunication, we were waiting on opposite corners of a shop that was bent in an L-shape and so couldn't see each other. Once we figured it out, we laughed and had a beer at a local pub, along with some nice sandwiches for dinner. Mine was goat cheese, arugula (rocket in London!) and roasted red peppers on a nice firm white bread, along with a nice cup of a coffee-like dark, warm, flat ale (I wish I knew the name of it, so I could drink it again). Us travelers were really tired, though. So at about nine pm, we left the pub, walked through Kensington for a bit and found a really pretty, open park, with a group of teenagers fighting with water pistols across the green from a palace or something. Eventually, we went back to the hotel on the tube.
I just want to write you a quick note to say I made it into London ok. I don't have the adaptor to charge my phone, nor is there free wifi anywhere around here, so we found an internet cafe to drop a quick line. I should have regular access to email and free wifi in Jordan, however. That will be awesome, since I already have like 50 emails in the last two days, and internet access is £2 per hour - which is kind of expensive at the 2:1 exchange rate.
We wandered around yesterday after getting a beer (warm, flat, good dark ale though) at a real British pub. And today we've been walking around in Westminster, looking at historical sites and the Eye. I've taken a lot of architecture photos, and John and Fady are starting to tease me that I never take photos of people. Well, I did take a photo of a really pretty woman riding a bike. But I was also stuck in traffic on the London Ducks tour and was starting to get bored :)
The Ducks tour was pretty cool but it makes me want to do the Seattle Ducks, something that I never thought I would say. The London Ducks seem much more dignified, seeing as they don't make you sing or give out any duck quackers.
We went to find a pub for a late lunch/early dinner kind of deal, and they picked the most English looking place available. Which was hilarious, because it served Thai food. Really, really good Thai, actually, though the boys were shocked and wanted to move on. I claimed my feet were too tired and got a sweet curry out of the deal.
We went to the National Gallery on the evening of the same day. That was pretty cool, we got to see real Van Goghs, Raphaels, and so on. They were pretty protective about photos, though, so no good way to document that part. And of all the museum shops that I ended up visiting in London, that was by far the dullest. You could buy pencils with marabou on the ends, cheap watercolor sets meant for kids, and tons of blank-inside cards. Come on, art, you can do better!
The next day, Friday, we went back to the Westminster area to find more museums. This was all after Fady couldn't sleep and had been up since 2 am, quietly but steadily interrupting me and John's sleep until about 6 am, when we finally all called it and turned the lights on and laughed at each other. However, we couldn't travel on our tube passes till after 9:30 am, so we killed some time in the hotel, where we got the full English breakfast every morning. That was probably one star in the two star hotel rating. They custom made your fresh eggs, which had good dark orange yolks, and then gave you some previously frozen hash browns, fresh toast, and somewhat weak but effective British coffee. I love the black currant jam, and look forward to hunting it down again when I'm in the states. I heard that black currants only recently became legal in New York due to some weird olden-days law, and that explains why I hardly see them except as an import. I love black currants. Anyhow....
We ended up at the British Museum, where we saw some amazing marbles, fossils and geological specimens. Also, the Rosetta stone. We went through several school crowds and marveled at the huge size of many of the things the Brits borrowed from other cultures. Then we got tired of the whistling, screaming children and moved on to the next museum, the Natural History Museum, which we had the wrong directions to. It was funny, though, we asked a bobby, hopped back on the tube, and figured it all out ok. The Natural History Museum was pretty cool but it was SWELTERING. So we only stayed inside for about 45 minutes, but I raided their shop since theirs was the coolest of any of the museum shops I'd seen so far.
The boys were tired, and wanted to take a nap on the lawn in front of the museum, but I harangued them into moving. I wasn't going to be comfortable, sitting there watching them sleep.
We went back to the hotel on the tube, took a nap and showered, and went to Ministry of Sound. That was quite the experience, as we were getting there at about 8, had wrong directions again (seriously Google Maps London, WTF?!?) and needed to eat badly. We walked around to an intersection (more of a roundabout really) where there was a pub with a beer garden on one side and a Balti place on the other. (Balti being some iron pot or something that is integral to some sort of Indian subculture's cuisine.) The boys wanted to go to the pub, and I put my foot down. We'd already been to a pub for lunch the same day, and I told them that one pub per day is plenty, while two would be too many. Also, I heard the Indian food in London is the best you can get outside of India, and Friday was our last night there. So we went to have Indian food. The boys both got some version of biryiani while I had balti. And it was DEEEELICIOUS. I have no regrets.
We ended up at the club shortly after it opened. Ministry was very big. It probably could fit a thousand people in one of the four rooms plus a VIP area that was glassed in so you could be jealous of the punters who got to sit there. It seemed to be roughly broken into downtempo/lounge, house, hard trance, and glitch. FOUR ROOMS OF DIFFERENT STUFF ALL GOOD, K?!?
We left kind of early, though, seeing as the club was open until 6:30 am. I bought souvenirs, though!
Then Saturday was our travel day.